HARDLY ANYONE KNOWS
HARDLY ANYONE KNOWS
Yesterday I attended the Bahá’í Unit Convention for northern Tasmania. I drove home with my Tasmanian wife, Chris, and with the oldest Bahá’í who had attended the Unit Convention, a Mr. Simon van der Molen age 78. As we drove through the hills, valleys, flat stretches of road and the occasional little town: Westbury, Exeter, Birralee, I reflected on all those Unit Conventions I had attended since the early sixties. This Unit Convention system was devised by the Universal House of Justice and is described briefly in the book "Principles of Bahá’í Administration,(1976,1963)."-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 11 February 2007.
Well, that makes 40 meetings
of this electoral unit system,
as far back as'64, yes,
at the Brant Inn,
getting a bit vague now.
I have to take off the year
we lived on Baffin Island
and recently when I was
just too tired and did not
want to get elected so stayed
home and one of those years
in Perth WA when I had run
out of gas-a happening from
time to time over those 40 years.
Two words--forty years--which
are easy to write down but
deceptively complex and require
volumes to put in the details.
There's a blur of towns, places,
rooms, food, discussions, people,
drink, entertainment, voting, reports,
decisions, ballots, documents, letters,
photos, worries, sadnesses and joys,
heat, cold, across two continents,
just about dries-out the psyche,
fills the memory to overflowing,
thinking about it. You can't put it
all down in a prose-poem; it's just
too much, too late, too long------
the first forty years of this new
electoral system and me from 21
to these years of early late adulthood,
about the sametime frame as Moses
going to the Promised Land so long ago
just about every one has forgotten--
Now hardly anyone knows about
these little events that dot
the landscape of the world,
the first tier in a global electoral
system that is taking the world
by storm from Spitzbergen
to the ends of Tasmania:
but so slowly no one would
ever guess and with agrace
so contained as to pose no threat,
not this, not these few in their ragged
semi-circle far from the decisions
distantly drawing them forward.
The resolutions, often fragile,
as they inch their consequential
necessary way in a process that
has just begun in this final stage of history.
Ron Price 11 February 2007
Yesterday I attended the Bahá’í Unit Convention for northern Tasmania. I drove home with my Tasmanian wife, Chris, and with the oldest Bahá’í who had attended the Unit Convention, a Mr. Simon van der Molen age 78. As we drove through the hills, valleys, flat stretches of road and the occasional little town: Westbury, Exeter, Birralee, I reflected on all those Unit Conventions I had attended since the early sixties. This Unit Convention system was devised by the Universal House of Justice and is described briefly in the book "Principles of Bahá’í Administration,(1976,1963)."-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 11 February 2007.
Well, that makes 40 meetings
of this electoral unit system,
as far back as'64, yes,
at the Brant Inn,
getting a bit vague now.
I have to take off the year
we lived on Baffin Island
and recently when I was
just too tired and did not
want to get elected so stayed
home and one of those years
in Perth WA when I had run
out of gas-a happening from
time to time over those 40 years.
Two words--forty years--which
are easy to write down but
deceptively complex and require
volumes to put in the details.
There's a blur of towns, places,
rooms, food, discussions, people,
drink, entertainment, voting, reports,
decisions, ballots, documents, letters,
photos, worries, sadnesses and joys,
heat, cold, across two continents,
just about dries-out the psyche,
fills the memory to overflowing,
thinking about it. You can't put it
all down in a prose-poem; it's just
too much, too late, too long------
the first forty years of this new
electoral system and me from 21
to these years of early late adulthood,
about the sametime frame as Moses
going to the Promised Land so long ago
just about every one has forgotten--
Now hardly anyone knows about
these little events that dot
the landscape of the world,
the first tier in a global electoral
system that is taking the world
by storm from Spitzbergen
to the ends of Tasmania:
but so slowly no one would
ever guess and with agrace
so contained as to pose no threat,
not this, not these few in their ragged
semi-circle far from the decisions
distantly drawing them forward.
The resolutions, often fragile,
as they inch their consequential
necessary way in a process that
has just begun in this final stage of history.
Ron Price 11 February 2007
Labels: autobiography, Baha'i, Tasmania, Unit Convention
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